Curved Non-Newtonian Liquid Jets With Surfactants

Applications of the breakup of a liquid jet into droplets are common in a variety of different industrial and engineering processes. One such process is industrial prilling, where small spherical pellets and beads are generated from the rupture of a liquid thread. In such a process, curved liquid jets produced by rotating a perforated cylindrical drum are utilized to control drop sizes and breakup lengths. In general, smaller droplets are observed as the rotation rate is increased. The addition of surfactants along the free surface of the liquid jet as it emerges from the orifice provides a possibility of further manipulating breakup lengths and droplet sizes. In this paper, we build on the work of Uddin et al. (2006, “The Instability of Shear Thinning and Shear Thickening Liquid Jets: Linear Theory,” ASME J. Fluids Eng., 128, pp. 968–975) and investigate the instability of a rotating liquid jet (having a power law rheology) with a layer of surfactants along its free surface. Using a long wavelength approximation we reduce the governing equations into a set of one-dimensional equations. We use an asymptotic theory to find steady solutions and then carry out a linear instability analysis on these solutions.